As I often point out, people who complain about “joy rides for the wealthy” shouldn’t watch media devices like Blu-Ray players, because they were once just “toys for the wealthy.” As were the computers on which they type such complaints. I do think that, that some people, and particularly Virgin, overhype point to point. And it’s not clear what Virgin’s path is to either that or orbit with their current vehicle design. It doesn’t scale well with velocity.
Category Archives: Business
Rethinking Fat
Even NPR is starting to figure it out.
But note, that, as with climate “science,” dissenters have trouble getting published when they have actual science in opposition to the “settled” science in nutrition:
“Fat was really the villain,” says Walter Willett, who is chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. And, by default, people “had to load up on carbohydrates.”
But, by the mid-1990s, Willett says, there were already signs that the high-carb, low-fat approach might not lead to fewer heart attacks and strokes. He had a long-term study underway that was aimed at evaluating the effects of diet and lifestyle on health.
“We were finding that if people seemed to replace saturated fat — the kind of fat found in cheese, eggs, meat, butter — with carbohydrate, there was no reduction in heart disease,” Willett says.
Willett submitted his data to a top medical journal, but he says the editors would not publish his findings. His paper was turned down.
“There was a lot of resistance to anything that would question the low-fat guidelines,” Willett says, especially the guidelines on saturated fat.
Willett’s paper was eventually published by a British medical journal, the BMJ, in 1996.
And that was almost twenty years ago, and the junk-science FDA guidelines that probably killed my father in the seventies remain pretty much in place.
Sleep Deprivation
Does it partially explain the high failure rate of tech start ups?
SpaceX prides itself on its Silicon Valley culture. I hope they’re not driving people to the point at which they have an accident.
The Silicon Valley Bubble
Mozilla was almost certainly too insular to anticipate the firefox firestorm that may be about to hit them.
The Warm Mongers’ Con Game
It continues, but the marks aren’t falling for it any more.
Steve Goddard Explains
“Why I do this”:
I have been an active environmentalist for almost my entire life. At age 16 I testified before a Congressional hearing in support of a proposed wilderness area in Utah. I worked to get the Clean Air Act passed, and worked for two summers as a wilderness ranger in New Mexico. I do all of my local transport and shopping by bicycle, and buy almost exclusively organic and free range food.
The reason I blog is because catastrophic global warming is junk science, used by unscrupulous people for unscrupulous political and financial purposes. It keeps environmentalists from doing anything useful, and provides progressives an excuse to push toward totalitarianism.
The global warming scam needs to be stopped. It has spiraled completely out of control, and no longer has any pretense of science behind the lies.
Pretty much, yeah.
The GM Scandal
It may be worse than you think:
…does anyone believe that the Obama administration took as hard a look at GM as it did Toyota?
Because it was Government Motors, and a payoff to the president’s ally, the UAW, and a rip off of the taxpayer.
What Keeps Women Out Of STEM
Among other things, they don’t like the dating pool. I wonder if The Big Bang Theory helps, or hurts with that perception?
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems vaguely related: Redefining boyhood. As a disease to be treated.
I guess you could say it’s a pre-existing condition.
The Seven Million Bigots
But why stop there? According to Wikipedia, 7,001,084 people voted for Prop 8. Why do any of those people still have jobs? Shouldn’t they all be forced to resign? And why should they have the privilege of living in California at all? I say round them up and move them someplace where they won’t do any harm.
Oh, and let’s find every media figure, writer or actor or musician, who voted for Prop 8. Surely they’re a special danger. Someone should start an investigation — form a committee to investigate un-American activities like that, expose the malefactors, and make them identify anyone else they know who was involved. Let’s make it clear that differing on these opinions is unacceptable. Like Eich, they should be blacklisted and never allowed to work again.
Damn straight.
[Update a while later]
Glenn has a lot more. Apparently Mozilla is getting a lot of negative feedback, but as he points out, OK Cupid should be taking a lot of heat, too, particularly considering their hypocrisy.
[Update mid morning]
The “liberal” mob claims another scalp.
People who behave this way are many things, but liberal is not one of them.
[Early afternoon update]
“The Internet just cut off its nose to spite its Facebook.”
I would never defend a homophobe—but does “pure hate” homophobia include dedicating oneself to outreach to “marginalized” LGBT developers, as Eich did almost immediately? Does Mozilla further its cause-privacy uber alles and the free flow of information—by making its pioneers into pariahs in social media, while issuing blatantly hypocritical statements which claim to treasure “religious diversity” at Mozilla? (And did anyone flinch when Mark Zuckerberg held GOP fundraisers?) Is what we want ”politically correct web browsing” where the Twittersphere and “socially conscious corporations” determine whose ideas are disseminated? Is this the open internet, or shall the open-source web be verboten to those “on the wrong side of history”?
This is a very very ugly precedent.
[Update a while later]
Andrew Sullivan continues to fight the good fight on this issue:
There is not a scintilla of evidence that he has ever discriminated against a single gay person at Mozilla; he was dedicated to continuing Mozilla’s inclusive policies; he was prepared to prove that the accusations against him were unfair, and that his political views would not affect his performance as CEO. But this was not enough. He had to be publicly punished for supporting a Proposition that is no longer in effect. This is absolutely McCarthyism from an increasingly McCarthyite left.
The only problem the Left ever had with McCarthyism was that they were McCarthy’s target.
The Immigration Coalition
Cracks are forming in it.
Good.